23 o SPECULATIVE SCIENCE 



sion that, after a limited or unlimited number of generations, the 

 inhabitants of the island will be white. Our shipwrecked hero 

 would probably become king ; he would kill a great many 

 blacks in the struggle for existence ; he would have a great 

 many wives and children, while many of his subjects would live 

 and die as bachelors ; an insurance company would accept his 

 life at perhaps one-tenth of the premium which they would 

 exact from the most favoured of the negroes. Our white's 

 qualities would certainly tend very much to preserve him to a 

 good old age, and yet he would not suffice in any number of 

 generations to turn his subjects' descendants white. It may be 

 said that the white colour is not the cause of the superiority. 

 True, but it may be used simply to bring before the senses the 

 way in which qualities belonging to one individual in a large 

 number must be gradually obliterated. In the first generation 

 there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes, much 

 superior in average intelligence to the negroes. We might 

 expect the throne for some generations to be occupied by a 

 more or less yellow king; but can anyone believe that the 

 whole island will gradually acquire a white or even a yellow 

 population, or that the islanders would acquire the energy, 

 courage, ingenuity, patience, self-control, endurance, in virtue 

 of which qualities our hero killed so many of their ancestors, 

 and begot so many children ; those qualities, in fact, which the 

 struggle for existence would select, if it could select anything ? 



Here is a case in which a variety was introduced, with far 

 greater advantages than any sport ever heard of, advantages 

 tending to its preservation, and yet powerless to perpetuate the 

 new variety. 



Darwin says that in the struggle for life a grain may turn 

 the balance in favour of a given structure, which will then be 

 preserved. But one of the weights in the scale of nature is due 

 to the number of a given tribe. Let there be 7,000 A's and 

 7,000 B's, representing two varieties of a given animal, and let 

 all the B's, in virtue of a slight difference of structure, have the 

 better chance of life by Y^^th part. We must allow that there 

 is a slight probability that the descendants of B will supplant 

 the descendants of A; bat let there be only 7,001 A's against 

 7,000 B's at first, and the chances are once more equal, while if 



